I cannot really remember when I first discovered and consulted Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. I just know for sure that I discovered Bourdieu through his 1972 paper in L’Année sociologique titled “Le marché des biens symboliques” that we had to read in a PhD seminar when I was a student in 1979-1980. Browsing Actes must have followed suit.

My first contact with Bourdieu himself was in 1983 when, still a PhD student, I sent him a brief paper I had published in the magazine La Recherche (January 1983, n^o 140, p. 112-113) sketching a sociology of the differences between the French and American academic book markets. I presented Bourdieu’s book collection Le sens commun, as an exception in France with its very detailed index of concepts at the end of each book. Typically, French books and French translations of English academic books were often without any index that the original English edition had included even though they are essential for their use as research tools. By contrast, English translations of French academic books, like those of Foucault that I took as an example, usually added such an index of notions, thus making the English version easier to search than the original French.

To my surprise, I did receive an answer from Bourdieu telling me – in his hard to read handwriting – that he liked the analysis, all the more so when one knows, he said, that the many hours invested in crafting these indexes, are destined to be overlooked. He concluded by telling me to send him any of my future work! Which I did…

My research interest being focused on the sociology of science, I was struck by the fact that Actes only devoted its first thematic issue to science and scientific research in 1988 (n^o 74), though Bourdieu had published his paper on the scientific field in 1975 in the Québec sociology journal Sociologie et sociétés, as part of a thematic issue titled “Science et structure sociale.” Conscious of the originality of his analysis and of the fact that the Québec journal was not easily accessible and thus visible in France, Bourdieu republished it in Actes in 1976 and also in English in the journal Social Science Information, in order to maximize its visibility. The 1988 thematic issue of Actes on Recherches sur la recherchecontained my first contribution to the journal in a joint paper I did on the evaluation of university professors with Marcel Fournier (who had been my PhD advisor) and his student Creutzer Mathurin. Having since published many papers in Actes, I experienced first-hand the specificity and originality of the journal.

The Specificity and Originality of Actes

I think that the most important aspect of the uniqueness of Actes in the field of scientific journals is linked to its large physical format which liberates the authors from the straitjacket that most academic journals impose on authors as if they were convinced that only written texts are needed to make a cogent argument. Their format is thus ill-suited to images and non-classical presentation of data. The very choice of the word “Actes” also aimed at reflecting the active construction of research results, making visible not only the theoretical analysis and interpretations embedded in sentences but also the data themselves through excerpts of interviews, archival documents and images. Also liberating is the fact that Actes is not obsessed with the so-called “methodology” section whose inflationary description in many journals simply hides the absence of a well-defined theoretical basis.

I think the best example of the contrast between what can be done in Actes and in journals and books of conventional format is provided by Bourdieu’s work on Heidegger. In order to make plain that philosophers are not living in the world of ideas but have a body that incorporates a social trajectory which also formed a singular habitus, the paper on L’ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger, published in Actes in 1975, contained many photos of Heidegger which make visible his social origins through his clothes and sport habits. Republished as a book under the same title in 1988, but in the traditional format, it did not include these representations of Heidegger, and I think the book lost a part of its convincing argumentative power, making the notion of habitus more abstract with the absence of Heidegger’s particular embodiment fixed by the photographs used in the original paper. We can realize the extent of the mutilation of an analysis by the exclusion of the images, by reading the pdf version of that paper now on the website Persée where the images (on p. 125-127,148-149) are absent. For technical reasons, independent of Persée and related to permissions to reproduce images under copyright, they had to be replaced by the note “illustration non autorisée à la diffusion.”

A more personal example of the freedom left to authors to even use a bit of irony in their analysis is provided by a paper I wrote in English in 1995 following the usual canon of a typical paper in the standard academic format. That same year, Bourdieu asked me to prepare a French version of that paper for Actes (June 1995, n^o 108). I used that opportunity to add three inserts presenting long citations from the English sources I analyzed. One was titled “Une sociologie… non sociologique” and presented three citations taken from papers published by Michel Callon and John Law that clearly illustrated their curious conception of sociology. The second presented a long citation taken from Bruno Latour’s paper “The politics of explanation,” which I titled “Tout est dans tout”. The third extract was from the same paper of Latour and I titled it “Expliquer… sans expliquer.” One can consider that the English version of my paper presented a convincing analysis of the logical and conceptual problems present in the constructivist sociology of science then promoted by Law, Callon and Latour, but I believe the French version, by showing long extracts of the original texts in English from these authors, provide a much stronger demonstration by the very “monstration” of their arguments. One could then hardly use the classic defense of being “cited out of context.”

I also had the chance to experiment with this freedom while preparing two issues of Actes with Bourdieu and Eric Brian during my stay at EHESS in 2000. The first was titled “Science” and came out in March 2002 as a double issue (n^o 141-142). The second thematic issue was titled “Entreprises académiques” and came out in June 2003 (n^o 148). In presenting the evolution of “idées d’universités” I could add long excerpts from important documents from Condorcet, Humboldt and Newman, which embody three very different conceptions of universities. Again, in the absence of such lengthy quotes, the analysis would have been abstract.

In a long analysis of the specific forms of the internationality of the scientific fields, published in the Science issue, I included a photo of scientists marching in the streets to defend research funding. Titled “Les travailleurs de la preuve” – an expression used by Bachelard – the photo showed a rare public manifestation of scientists using the classical form of demonstration with banderoles usually used by workers on strike. Such illustrations replace many words and are visibly revealing the changing status of scientists in a time of the massification of research and big science. Note again that the pdf version in Persée has not reproduced the image for the reasons already mentioned. I also included in that paper a large network analysis that would have been barely legible in the usual much smaller format of sociology journals. Finally, that paper having been published three years before the creation of the French Agence Nationale de la recherche (ANR) – which forces scientists to compete to get money for their research and thus learn how to write a convincing proposal – I added an insert titled “Comment obtenir un contrat de Bruxelles,” which exemplified a manner of asking  research money that was standard in England and North America, and would become so in France after the creation of ANR in 2005. Such an insert was at the same time ironic and realistic.

In conclusion, there is no doubt that the creation of Actes in 1975 was an event in the field of social sciences and that it was perceived as liberating from the straitjacket of a fixed order of presentation often summarized under the headings of “method,” “results,” “analysis,” copied without reflexivity on the so-called “exact” sciences. Over the last fifty years, Actes has clearly shown that combining texts, images and documents contributes to the robustness of the analyses while making scientific writing and reading more enjoyable without jeopardizing scientific rigor.